[FYI] Licensing News

[Giovanni]

Hello,

There will be changes in the ChibiOS/RT licensing, in the direction of less restrictions:

1) The portable HAL, the portable Kernel and the various compiler/architecture Ports will still be protected by the GPL3 with Exception and will be also offered commercially, no changes here.

2) The demos, test code, HAL test applications, and the HAL platforms code will be licensed under a BSD license (any better option?).
The BSD code will not be offered commercially but made available as code examples at no added cost. Basically if you purchase the kernel you can use all the available HALs for free.
The rationale for this is that the HAL absorbs most of the development bandwidth but so far commercial users have not been interested in it, only in the kernel, but the HAL is what makes ChibiOS/RT popular so it is very important.

This will give us the following advantages:
1) Streamline licenses, way too many commercial options right now and it is confusing.
2) Commercial and FOSS users will be able to modify the HALs freely on both stable and unstable versions. HALs it is where more often small customizations are needed and the release cycle is way too slow and the current licensing too restrictive.
3) HALs will be made available for free to commercial users but only supported as FOSS software, no warranty.
4) I will be able to accept code more easily into the HALs.

The change will be effective in 2.6.x.

Suggestions are welcome of course

Giovanni

[Tectu]

In my opinion, setting the test and demo codes under BSD is a very good idea.


~ Tectu

[iggarpe]

I, for one, welcome this new license scheme, particularly the HAL part. I agree it's where most often customizations are needed and the release cycle is too slow, or in some cases the customiations will never make it upstream.

[lmamakos]

I think this is an excellent development. I know when I looked at the licensing options a while ago, the only concern that I had was the need to tweak something in the HAL and what impact that might have had on what version I could run. This latest change completely removes any concern on that question.

[Giovanni]

The FSF recommends the Apache license over the BSD one. The text is here:

http://directory.fsf.org/wiki/License:Apache2.0

Any comment about this license? it seems to better protect the authors and still allow any modification like the BSD license.

Giovanni

[Freddie Chopin]

There's also an interesting license http://www.boost.org/users/license.html

4\/3!!

[tinito]

I welcome BSD licensing for the HAL, this may also speedup HAL support for new platform.

About Apache2.0 license, I dropped it in favor of BSD for two reasons:
- it is much more well written than BSD, but also much more complicated to read for normal (non lawyers) users. In my opinion most of the users would read the BSD and thus know how the software is licensed, while many of them would _not_ read all the Apache2.0 text and just use the software as it was Public Domain
- it is compatible with GPLv3 but not with GPLv2, and I wanted to be sure that there were no restrictions at all in the use of my software in other projects

[Giovanni]

The boost license looks interesting but Tinito has a good point, the BSD is so common that you don't have event to read it.

[Freddie Chopin]

Just imagine how many people break BSD license, by NOT including any info about lib in documentation which accompanies the binary (; With Boost license you just stop the hypocrisy (;

4\/3!!

[Giovanni]

Thanks for all the feedback. I finally settled for the Apache 2.0 license because I think it grants freedom and better protects the rights of the contributors.

The files affected by relicensing are those under:
./boards
./demos
./test
./testhal
./os/hal/platforms (except vendor files of course)
./os/templates

I hope the new licensing scheme will make ChibiOS even more accessible and is effective now in the 2.5.x tree.

Please let me know if you find mislicensed files around and, please, all contributors make sure to apply the correct license before committing.

Giovanni